The Indianapolis journal. [volume] (Indianapolis [Ind.]) 1867-1904, 1887-01-16
HARD-woRKED NovELIsTs.
A Bookseller Thinks He Would Rather b
a Day Laharar than a Story. Yritar

bookseller Thinks He Would Rather Be
Day Laborer than Story Writer.
New York Maj and Express.
duct than write books for living looking at 1t
merely as matter OF manual labor" said a
Broadway book seller. whose experience runs
back quarter OF a century. did you ever
think of what the labors OF wrting-merely
moving the pen over the paper to say nothing
of the mental strain-must be in writing an
ordinary book9 Take a novel like one of How
el!s's, fornstance 1t contains, say $50 pages,
with an average of 400 words to the page, or l4O
600 words How many hours OF composition do you
suppose that meansI Well. |. 400 words an hour
Is considered a pretty good gait, even If you
know exactly what you want to say and can clip
along without stopping to study construction.
That would mean, at least. under the most IA
vorable circumstances imaginable, 100 hours OF
writing. Now. few authors can compose steadily
more than two hours day Surprising, there
fore. that the author knows exactly what he
wants to write every day. and can plow on with
out interruption, il would take fifty days to
grind out book like one of Mr.. Howels's
But many authors have assured me that on an
average they write each book over three times
before they ara satisfied to leave It. When you
consider. besides this that the labor Of writing
is. of course the merest trife compared with
the other iabors OF authorship. you can see that
| there is no picnic about it.
when you think of all these things. the
amount of work done by some Of our leading
novelists seems prodigious. There is Miss
Braddon. for instance. Her tireless pen has
already raced through fifty complete works of
| fiction. and there is probability-hope. some
people might say-that her supply will run
| short for twenty years to come. Probably there
are G, 000, 900 printed words in theee books and
| to write thep her hand must have travelled over
SO, 600 or 10000 sheets of paper even on the sup
position that she never tore up rewrote
sheet. Sixty thousand sheets OF manuscript
paper would make pile as high as this room.
Surprising that Miss Braddon labors under
1
she has probably written over three
or four such piles in the past
| fifteen or twenty years. To do that is no joke,
| l can tell you. Yet there others who have
done nearly as much. The works of The Ouch
| ess are numbered in the forties. The author Of
Dora Thorne' has written thirty nine Mr.
Black has written twenty-five novels; Besant
and Rice turned out twenty three. and Wilkie
Collins has published thirtytwo Dickenss
| works, including mis- sketches collected into vol.
| umes and the story that he wrote with Wilkie
| Collins. make thirty Eve books. Nobody knows
| how many Miss Holmes has turned out but
some persons think there hundred Of them
az ies. f..s, .cs. -: .. ae.:s
Mrs. Soushworth and others have reeled out
story after story, year 10 and year out. The man
who makes any money with hs pen is no slug
gard. you can be sure.
"Hard as those writer's work, however, the
serial story writer's for the weekly papers dc
much better lof *oTsel than any of them. The
& ss s e y 81: essY 80 I ms:
SO, 900 from its production last year. He re-
/ ossived only $3.50 for each serial Consequently,
ha ), ust have written in single year twenty
serials. 8. .20o, GOO words-nearly ten times the
au o.s aro Gs The late Ned Rupsns i.
said to have made $780, 200 By writing this class
Of literature. TODD so hS n.us t have ground on,
durine his lifetime not less han LOG, 600 0ot
J words Of copy, which means ~ almost .insalcui